Tag Archive for equality

A Theology of Equality

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When God made humankind, He made them male and female, both equally in His image (Genesis 1:26-27). According to Peter this makes men and women co-heirs of the grace of life (1 Peter 3:7). He chose to do so in a staggered fashion, however, creating the male first, followed by the female. In so doing, God created and exemplified an order: the man would be the spiritual leader (1 Timothy 2:12-13).

The Fall introduced depravity into the male-female relationship (Gen. 3:16), men dominating women through sheer strength, and women desiring to usurp men’s role of leadership. When in Christ, the abuses and enmity between the sexes can be erased, with both finding their fullest identity in Him (Gal 3:28). By the grace of Christ, husbands can again be chivalrous, loving leaders, and women can be strong, supportive companions (Ephesians 5:22-33).

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All ethnicities are ultimately one race: the human race (Acts 17:26). God allowed and even separated different nations as an act of simultaneous judgement and mercy (Gen. 11:6-9; Acts 17:26-27). The development of these different ethnic groupings both retarded the depravity and rebellion of the human race, and allowed the common grace of God to work separately in each (Acts 14:16-17; 17:27). To the degree that each ethnicity rebelled against the light given to them explains the relative distance of the resulting cultures from biblical norms and truths. Some were closer in morals and practices to biblical ideals, some were much further away (Rom. 1:18-32). Ethnicities that were exposed to the Gospel and responded positively to it had the privilege of shaping their norms and practices around revealed truth.

In Christ, ethnic hatred, pride, and partiality is a thing of the past (Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11; Jas. 2:1-10). Though Israel retains its place as a chosen ethnicity for God’s own purposes (Rom. 9:5-6; 11:1-6), believers now partake of a new, shared identity as one new humanity in Christ (Eph. 2:11-22). Just as male and female difference do not disappear in Christ, nor do ethnic idiosyncrasies and traits, which even Paul noted about the Cretans (Tis. 1:12-13). The point is, these will either be transformed by Christ, or become part of the glorious variety that makes up the redeemed (Rev. 5:9). Believers can no longer use ethnic differences as point of division or separation within the body of Christ.

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When God made man, He instructed man to spread His glory throughout the Earth by subjugating it to intelligent and orderly design (Gen. 1:26-28). This would require a vast variety of abilities, gifts, and talents. Even after the Fall, this variety is not lost, with men specialising in agriculture (Gen. 4:20), music (4:21), and metallurgy (4:22). Men chose leaders, kings and priests as far back as we can tell. Systems of government and societal structure were, once again, as good or bad as they were close or distant from God’s truth. Brutal and inhumane systems emerge very early.

The stratification of society is not regarded as an evil, though. Israel’s law makes room for leaders, elders, judges, priests, and kings. It allows for indentured servanthood to pay off debts. It predicts that poor people will remain a fixture of society and calls for compassion and generosity for those poor willing to work. It predicts that some Israelites will be wealthy, and insists that their wealth is not to give them an advantage in the law courts. It does not penalise them for being wealthy, but it prevents their wealth from perverting justice.

In the New Testament, Paul accepts as a reality the fact that the church may be composed of the lower classes (1 Cor. 1:26-27). He tells the Corinthians that it is God’s plan to have a Body composed of members very different in function, ability, and presentability (12:11-27). He cautions them against coveting another’s position, denigrating their own, or being puffed up about themselves. But he does not call for uniformity in status or position. All are to be cherished and loved, but some are worthy of double honour (1 Tim. 5:17). Some are to be esteemed very highly in love for their work’s sake. Christian servants must work for their masters, even the cruel ones, with submissive, honest, zealous labour (1 Pet. 2:18-19). Believing masters must rule without harshness (Eph. 6:9). Paul does not call for the societal abolition of slavery, but tells Philemon to treat Onesimus like a brother, not a slave, thereby implicitly undermining the institution.

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As we can see, a biblical theology of equality shows that equality is a word that cannot be used to mean the same thing in all contexts. Are humans equally in God’s image? Yes. Are humans equal? No: not in ability, intelligence, perceptiveness, appearance, or even opportunity. Some equality is good and should be fought for: equality before the law, and equal access to the Gospel. Some equality is impossible and is like chasing rainbows: equality of outcome for all, equal pay for all people, equal education for all aptitudes, equal roles for different sexes, ages, and abilities.

Some forms of equality are justice. Some forms of inequality require redress to obtain that justice.

Some forms of inequality are not unjust; they are simply the form of creation. Some forms of enforced equality are unjust and produce the very opposite of what they claimed to pursue.

Equality and Necessary Hierarchy

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The current proponents of social justice have little idea of what they may be creating in pursuit of their goal. Their goal is a just society, but the pursuit of radical egalitarianism won’t provide them with that.

Richard Weaver, writing in 1948, describes how radical egalitarianism provides nothing that traditional societies already produced, and may actually be producing a cancerous envy that will destroy society from within. It promises a fiction, and the frustration from pursuing a non-existent and impossible order creates growing angst and unhappiness.

“Equality is a disorganizing concept in so far as human relationships mean order. It is order without a design; it attempts a meaningless and profitless regimentation of what has been ordered from time immemorial by the scheme of things. No society can rightly offer less than equality before the law; but there can be no equality of condition between youth and age or between the sexes; there cannot be equality even between friends. The rule is that each shall act where he is strong; the assignment of identical roles produces first confusion and then alienation, as we have increasing opportunity to observe. Not only is this disorganizing heresy busily confounding the most natural social groupings, it is also creating a reservoir of poisonous envy. How much of the frustration of the modern world proceeds from starting with the assumption that all are equal, finding that this cannot be so, and then having to realize that one can no longer fall back on the bond of fraternity!

However paradoxical it may seem, fraternity has existed in the most hierarchical organizations; it exists, as we have just noted, in that archetype of hierarchy, the family. The essence of co-operation is congeniality, the feeling of having been “born together.” Fraternity directs attention to others, equality to self; and the passion for equality is simultaneous with the growth of egotism. The frame of duty which fraternity erects is itself the source of ideal conduct. Where men feel that society means station, the highest and the lowest see their endeavors contributing to a common end, and they are in harmony rather than in competition. It will be found as a general rule that those parts of the world which have talked least of equality have in the solid fact of their social life exhibited the greatest fraternity. Such was true of feudal Europe before people succumbed to various forms of the proposal that every man should be king. Nothing is more manifest than that as this social distance has diminished and all groups have moved nearer equality, suspicion and hostility have increased. In the present world there is little of trust and less of loyalty. People do not know what to expect of one another. Leaders will not lead, and servants will not serve.

It is a matter of common observation, too, that people meet most easily when they know their position. If their work and authority are defined, they can proceed on fixed assumptions and conduct themselves without embarassment toward inferior and superior. When the rule of equality obtains, however, no one knows where he belongs. Because he has been assured that he is “just as good as anybody else,” he is likely to suspect that he is getting less than his deserts, Shakespeare concluded his wonderful discourse on degree with reference to “an envious fever.” And when Mark Twain, in the role of Connecticut Yankee, undertook to destroy the hierarchy of Camelot, he was furious to find that serfs and others of the lower order were not resentful of their condition. He adopted then the typical Jacobin procedure of instilling hatred of all superiority. Resentment, as Richard Hertz has made plain, may well prove the dynamite which will finally wreck Western society…

It is generally assumed that the erasing of all distinctions will usher in the reign of pure democracy. But the inability of pure democracy to stand for something intelligible leaves it merely a verbal deception. If it promises equality before the law, it does no more than empires and monarchies have done and cannot use this as a ground to assert superiority. If it promises equality of condition, it promises injustice, because one law for the ox and the lion is tyranny.”

(Ideas Have Consequences, pp 42-44)

Equality is Medicine, Not Food

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I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don’t think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. To attempt to restore it now would be the same error as that of the Nudists. Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.
But medicine is not good. There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values―offers food to some need which we have starved.

― C. S. Lewis, Equality

According to Lewis, legal and economic quality is a convention we use to protect ourselves from one another. In other words, centuries of human abuse have revealed that while inequalities most certainly exist, we are seldom prepared to deal rightly with these inequalities, when we’re in a position to exploit them. Those physically weaker, financially poorer, or even intellectually less capable are almost always exploited by their superiors. It was the biblical religion that first rebuked this tendency, calling on Israel to care for the three groups most easily exploited: orphans, widows, and the poor.

Centuries of jurisprudence and political thought were necessary for the implications of these ideas to germinate and reach full bud: that every human being was to receive exactly equal treatment before the law and that every person was to be part of a collective decision-making process that would protect us from the abuse of power in one or a few. Legal and political equality became one of the checks and balances of a free society.

Conversely, Lewis believes our intrinsic inequality is actually a splendid and beautiful variety. “In the same way, under the necessary outer covering of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual inequalities should be alive.” Created differences, differences in appearance, ability, intelligence, talents, or gifts are not a thing to be despised, but celebrated. And we celebrate them when we respect hierarchy, orders, and roles in society, the family, and the church.

This freedom is now devolving into tyranny, as those obsessed with equality now pursue it for opposite reasons from the Christian thinkers of the past. In their thinking, it is not man’s evil and propensity to harm others that requires legal equality; it is actually man’s innate goodness and propensity to excel that requires actual, enforced equality of outcomes. Inequality represents cosmic injustice, and requires correction. We must no longer simply say that men and women are equal before the law; we must ensure that we have an exactly equal number of female plumbers and male kindergarten teachers. We must no longer say that two citizens have an equal right to participate in government, we must insist that those two citizens receive the same schooling, and have exactly the same grades.

This is a deep disease of the soul, which slowly kills a society. Lewis again: “When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other―the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow―is a prosaic barbarian.”

The reason that the idol of Equality will kill its followers is that they will tyrannically enforce it on the world, while gorging themselves on perverted inequality elsewhere. “Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead―even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served―deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

Behold the society in which you live: where porn stars (famous prostitutes) are celebrated, while recognising distinctions between men and women can be a criminal offence.